TORONTO — When Noront Resources Ltd. blared the Johnny Cash song ‘Ring of Fire’ over and over at its annual meeting in Toronto in 2007, it felt like a giant party.

Only weeks earlier, Noront had made the first key mineral discovery in McFaulds Lake, a remote Northern Ontario region that was quickly nicknamed the Ring of Fire. Excitement about the find was at a fever pitch, and companies were staking land like crazy. No one could wait to find out what came next.

Fast-forward to this year’s Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) conference, and it is a different story. A session on the Ring of Fire drew a huge standing-room-only crowd on Wednesday, but with none of the euphoria of that Noront AGM. The session highlighted the staggering challenges that need to be overcome to get the region going: infrastructure, First Nations agreements, environmental compliance, transportation, and more.

“Our view is this goes beyond traditional mineral development activity,” said George Ross, Ontario’s deputy minister of northern development and mines. “There’s a lot of aspects to it.”

The Ring of Fire is thought to hold as much as $50-billion worth of minerals, and is going to be North America’s first major source of chromite, used in the making of stainless steel. It is one of the most important mineral discoveries in Ontario’s history.

With so many hurdles to overcome, progress towards construction has been very slow. But according to Cliffs Natural Resources Inc., which is developing the area’s first chromite mine and related infrastructure, many of these challenges are finally on the verge of being overcome.

“I think 2013 is a year where we’re coming in with all these things kind of uncertain,” Bill Boor, Cliffs’ senior vice-president of ferroalloys, said in an interview. “But this is a year where we’re going to clear up a lot of that uncertainty, and people are going to see this project is a reality.”

One key bottleneck is the need for a definitive agreement between the company and the Ontario government. The provincial election and subsequent Liberal leadership shake-up slowed the process, and Mr. Boor said the two sides are “urgently needing” to get back to the table.

Cliffs is making more progress in other areas. A feasibility study on the US$3.3-billion Black Thor chromite project will be completed later this year. Cliffs is keen to bring in a partner to share the capital cost and risk, and those talks are expected to get more “substantive” once the feasibility is done.

Mr. Boor also said good progress is being made in First Nations talks, even if it is not obvious from the outside. It has been a very complicated process, as the Ring of Fire has an enormous footprint and different communities have different concerns.

If everything goes according to plan, Mr. Boor said it is possible to reach production by late 2016. But he acknowledged that is a big long shot.

One of the biggest potential constraints involves Cliffs itself. The Cleveland-based miner is reeling right now, as it recently took a US$1-billion writedown on its Bloom Lake mine in Quebec and had to announce a share offering to shore up its balance sheet.

At the same time, Rio Tinto Ltd. is looking to sell its Labrador Trough operations, and Cliffs is one of only two logical buyers (Teck Resources Ltd. is the other). A large acquisition could make it harder to finance the Ring of Fire.

Mr. Boor acknowledged that if he had to go to the board to ask for US$3.3-billion today, it would be a tough sell. But he noted that support for the project has never wavered inside the company.

“I have a fundamental belief that when you have an exciting, good project, even when it’s this big and complex, you find a way,” he said.

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